A Lucky Irish Lad

Kevin O’Hara recreates his boyhood with these wonderful stories of growing up in Massachusetts in the 1950s and 60s as one of eight children. His parents, born in Ireland, came to this country for their children’s sake.  His family struggled against grinding poverty but they never gave up and never lost their faith that God had a plan for them. 

Kevin learned the lessons of making do and making things last, and what the true riches of the world are: good health and the love of a united family.  All these lessons grounded him as he reached adulthood…and was sent off to fight in the wilds of Vietnam as a reluctant solider.

This book will tug at your heart and make you cry tears of both sorrow and joy.  It is a story about the Irish-American experience but it is much more—it’s the story of a generation growing up in the shadow of the Second World War and the start of a new age of hope and promise, a time when people believed that anything was possible as long as you dared to dream and had faith in yourself.

And a little Irish luck couldn’t hurt either.

Kevin O’Hara recreates his boyhood with these wonderful stories of growing up in Massachusetts in the 1950s and 60s as one of eight children. His parents, born in Ireland, came to this country for their children’s sake. His family struggled against grinding poverty but they never gave up and never lost their faith that God had a plan for them.

Kevin learned the lessons of making do and making things last, and what the true riches of the world are: good health and the love of a united family. All these lessons grounded him as he reached adulthood…and was sent off to fight in wilds of Vietnam as a reluctant solider.

This book will tug at your heart and make you cry tears of both sorrow and joy. It is a story about the Irish-American experience but it is much more—it’s the story of a generation growing up in the shadow of the Second World War and the start of a new age of hope and promise, a time when people believed that anything was possible as long as you dared to dream and had faith in yourself.

And a little Irish luck couldn’t hurt either.

Publishers Weekly

On April 20, 1949, O’Hara subjected his mother to a dangerous and difficult night of labor; when the baby finally came out of the womb, his nose bled unabated until his father rushed into the room, whereupon the bleeding ceased immediately. Although a relative casually remarked that the young boy shared the same birthday as Adolf Hitler, O’Hara’s mother quickly remarked that her son would redeem the day and bring nothing but good into the world. As if to confirm his mother’s prophetic vision of her son’s future, O’Hara prosaically recounts the days of his life from when he arrived in Pittsfield, Mass., to early 1973, when he launched his career as a psychiatric nurse and married his wife. Like the countless memoirs of growing up Irish in America, O’Hara struggles with the demands of Catholicism, especially with the nightly devotions led by his father and in which he must participate on the pain of corporal punishment. He falls in love with a beautiful young Protestant girl, but the unremarkable adolescent yearnings and the puppyish nature of his first love fails to capture our attention. In fact, so little of O’Hara’s life is unique or noteworthy that his mundane memoir fails to distinguish it from so many other anecdotal autobiographies of other Americans coming-of-age in the 1950s and 1960s. (Feb.)

Kevin O'Hara has spent the last twenty years working as a psychiatric nurse at the Berkshire Medical Center. He lives in Pittsfield, Massachusetts.